Flight

        Great pairings can really make a difference when it comes to movies. Throughout time there have been some great ones, Ford and Wayne, Hitchcock and Grant, Spielberg and Hanks and the list goes on. “Flight” has added to this list with the pairing of Zemeckis and Washington, but will the film live up to the other great collaborations of the past?

     One place that “Flight” does live up to is its title, has airline Captain Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington) who loves to fly. He also loves to drink, and seems to do a lot of that. When flying a routine flight from Orlando to Atlanta he encounters a problem, which causes his plane to dive nose first. Somehow Capitan Whitaker is able to get the plane down with little loss of life. Whitaker is called a hero for saving most of the souls on the plane. It is not long after the crash that Capitan Whitaker is told about the blood test he took after the crash that showed he was legally drunk when he was flying the plane. In the hospital he meets Nicole (Kelly Reilly), who, like himself is an addict. The difference between them is that Nicole knows she has a problem. Whitaker is assigned a criminal lawyer named Hugh Lang (Don Cheadle) who tries to help Whitaker admit his problem and to put responsibility of the crash on the plane itself. “Flight” is the story of self-discovery and the paths life can take us.

       It is easy to have high hopes for a film like this. I always think of making a film is like making a great cake, if you have the right ingredients, and then you will have a great cake. Everything was set up right, but somewhere in the mixing of the ingredients, something went wrong, and the cake didn’t come out as good as it should have. Denzel was Denzel, doing exactly what you expect from a two time Oscar winner. When it came to the direction, you don’t get much better then Robert Zemeckis and he does not disappoint in his return to live action. To me the story, written by John Gatins, is the weaker ingredient. I wanted to get behind the story of addiction and self discovery, but felt bad at the depths some of these characters went to. I didn’t know who to root for most of the movie. Washington really does a great job of showing the perils of being an addict. “Flight” is not a bad movie; it just is not the movie it could have been. The one thing it does do well is redeeming its self with a great ending. Couple that with the opening fifteen minutes and you have a pretty good movie. The problem is the story in the middle. Expectations can be a bad thing when it comes to movies, I just wish this one had lived up to mine.

Brian Taylor